Election Poems: Blame Is Not for Teddy Bears, It’s For the Service Industry

Election Poems is a listening project. The poems you will read in this series document and respond to the politicized non-dialogue that seems to have invaded all forms of conversation these days, and the gas balloon of portent that’s escaping the seams. This is also a personal project. The content comes exclusively from my own listening experience, meaning conversations that people have had with me or things they have said in my presence, for better or worse, from the 2008 election cycle to the present. The results are not always easy to digest, and many of the poems deal with painful, disturbing, or incendiary ideas that have not gone away, as our current election season so aptly reminds us. But to be clear, the project is not about politicians, pundits, or campaigns, or the rhetorical moves they make in order to earn a vote, or tell the story of a given election. It is about everyone who is not running for office, and who/how we are to each other in an era where politics infuses everything.

For more information about this series and its concept, check out the introductory post. Previous poems can also be found on the series page. A new installment and image will appear every Tuesday from now through November 2016 (one week post-election), featuring poems from throughout the project, as well as a new one written specifically for the current week. The poems are titled by number, but will not appear in order.
71

Those readers, those peepers, those writers, those spellers,
those thinkers, those math-ers, those smug safety crackers,
those science groupie fuckers, those hadron colliders,
dirty double-blinders, mislaid doppelgangers,
study
everything
do
nothing
stop
all
that
nosing
around

22

Learn the color of your face
Don’t play further than the end of the driveway
Don’t know more than there is to know
Pull your dress up over your head in case of emergency
Pee in the neighbor’s yard when you can’t hold it
Go down swinging, not kissing

Blame is not for teddy bears, it’s for the service industry
Nation is your snuggly onesie
Peanut butter and jelly goes on white bread (period)

Courage is proprietary, atonement is blasphemy
Words are not love, action, or regret, they are words
Just say them loud enough and everyone will hear

And when your heart is a sinkhole
I will be there to fill it
with cement
and you will feel my hand and footprints on it,
and see my autograph
darling legacy

You will crave this yoke like a nipple soon enough

Election Poems: Blame Is Not for Teddy Bears, It’s For the Service Industry was last modified: May 9th, 2016 by Robin Myrick

Robin Myrick is a writer, visual artist, educator, and instigator currently based in Dallas, Texas. She’s also a reformed journalist (now tucked away in academia) who once scribbled at length about music, film, and pop culture for upstanding alt weeklies and newspapers across the South, as well the occasional corporate blowhole. Her more recent work has appeared in fine places such as Semigloss, [out of nothing], and Uno Kudo. You can also find her in the anthologies Any Way You Like ‘Em, Chronometry, and You’ve Probably Read This Before.